The Nu Places for Nu Faces course prepares ordinary believers to start new faith communities for the purposes of an extraordinary God!  We are about REAL places, REAL people, REAL conversations.

Throughout the one-year course of study, together, lay people and pastors will grow their abilities to:

• share the stories of Jesus Christ and explore their meaning for our daily lives,
• create new places for prayer, worship, justice and fellowship that are relevant for today, and
• respectfully engage our neighbors and our neighborhoods as people and places where God's Spirit already dwells!

Nu Places is a curriculum for equipping and empowering lay people and local pastors to develop new faith communities, strengthening local churches and expanding the Body of Christ. We are training disciples to make disciples. The Call to Action and the various responses recognize that revitalization of the United Methodist Church must be locally based and driven by congregations.

Nu Places offers a forum to reveal leaders within congregations and a platform to train current lay leaders who together are opening the doors to rapid, exponential growth through the creation of informal, relational outreach groups. Through theological reflection, Bible study, and organizational training, Nu Places puts congregants and local pastors on the cutting edge of church growth by creating communities, rather than planting churches. These small, functional, self-contained communities can help to “fill in the spaces” where churches have found it difficult to expand, reaching new people.

The inaugural Nu Places class is developing ministries as familiar as Bible studies and youth groups, as innovative as support groups for victims of domestic violence and the homeless. There are small house groups and praise bands forming. There are also many members of the class waiting on their call, but they too have seen their faith strengthened, their leadership cultivated, and their discipleship challenged.

Nu Places for Nu Faces is a year long journey of exploration to take the Gospel out of the pews and into the communities around our churches and around our homes. Members are challenged to grow spiritually and emotionally in a nurturing and supportive learning environment as the Holy Spirit reveals new ways and places to reveal the worldwide Body of Christ. From sessions focused on scripture to those aimed at understanding the history and traditions of the Methodist movement, participants develop ideas in dialog with others to create ideas for new communities – some strikingly new and others surprisingly old.